Highlights
Cinema: a home for everything you'd watch or listen to. A new app sits right on your home screen: live shows happening right now, videos to watch whenever you like, and radio stations you can just tune into. One search box covers live shows, radio, videos, people and collections at the same time, with quick tabs to narrow it down. Browse by topic - Bitcoin, gaming, music, news, sports, tech, AI, art, and more - or just start typing.
Live rooms, in Cinema and wherever else you watch. Watching a live stream used to be just watching. Now, whether you're in a stream you found through Discover or search or in one of the new shows inside Cinema, you can join the conversation and post right into the room. Zaps roll through the chat as golden moments, each one checked against the actual payment before it is shown, so what you see is real. Zap the host without leaving Lotus, follow them or save them to Contacts right from the room, see who else is on air with them, watch a fundraising goal fill up, and read the host's pinned message. Chat itself grew up: names above messages grouped like a real conversation, emoji and custom emoji, a Host badge, and a jump-to-newest button when you've scrolled into the past. Scheduled shows show a countdown and a one-tap "Add to calendar." Cinema's own rooms go further still, with a calm cinema mode that lets the picture take over the screen while chat floats along one edge, replies and quotes that read like a real conversation, live polls, and a full screen view that strips everything else away.
Watching on your phone finally feels right. The video pins to the top, the conversation fills the rest of the screen, and the message box stays above your keyboard, in Cinema's rooms and in the stream sheet alike. Details about the show tuck behind a small arrow until you want them, and in Cinema's cinema mode the picture goes letterboxed with light-touch controls sized properly for a thumb.
The video that follows you. Scroll away from a live room or the watch page and the picture collapses into a small, compact player up top instead of disappearing - scroll back and it expands again, no restart, no lost place.
Watch page, built properly. Chapters you can jump to, captions, a quality picker that adapts to your connection instead of stalling, cast credits, comments, and a related row for what to watch next. Reactions and comments work the way they do everywhere else in Lotus.
A real zap dialog. Pick from a grid of amounts, switch between sats and your everyday currency with a live conversion, add a note, and send - all from one screen instead of a tall stack of steps. When a creator splits their zaps between people, each recipient gets paid separately and one failed payment never blocks the rest.
Radio, with a station that keeps playing. Tune into a live station and keep browsing Lotus - a small bar at the bottom keeps the music going and lets you jump back with one tap. Chat and zaps work in a station the same way they do in a live show.
Polls in the chat. Start a poll from the message box, watch the results fill in live, and see when it closes. Votes are public and permanent, same as any post on the network - Lotus says so plainly before you vote.
Keep what you love. Save a video for later, favorite a live show or station, and everything you've watched or listened to shows up in your new Library so you can pick up right where you left off - or clear it out whenever you want.
Bookmarks: one place for everything you find. Search is where you find things; Bookmarks is where you get them back. Save a post or an article with one tap from the reader, and it lands in your new Bookmarks app, private by default. Sort your reading into named lists, keep favorite web pages with titles and topics, and share a list with a friend when you want to. Because it is built on the open Nostr standards, bookmarks you made in other apps show up in Lotus, and bookmarks you make here work everywhere else. The home screen search bar now carries a small Bookmarks button that peeks at your recent saves.
Bring your bookmarks with you. Import your browser bookmarks from Chrome, Safari, Firefox and friends, folders and all, straight from the export file. Coming from a read-later app? Pocket, Raindrop and Instapaper exports import too, with their shelves and collections kept as folders and their dates intact. Everything is read on your device; nothing in the file is uploaded or published. Your private library also cleans up after itself: a duplicates review finds the same page saved twice, even across folders, and anything you remove goes to the Trash, never straight to the void.
Send real invoices from your Wallet. Write an invoice with your business details and logo, watch the finished document take shape while you type, then download it as a PDF, print it, or send it. Getting paid works over Lightning, partial payments are tracked against the total, and an invoice that is overdue shows up on your home screen where you cannot miss it. The whole thing runs in your browser; your invoices are yours.
Lotus Pro learns some reading tricks. Pro can now keep an offline copy of a saved web page: a clean, readable version that stays on your device and opens instantly, even if the page changes or disappears. Search also gets deeper for Pro readers, looking inside those saved copies and inside full article text, and showing you the sentence that matched. The free promise stays firm: everything that lives on the open network, your saved posts, articles, lists and public web pages, is unlimited and free forever.
Week numbers on the calendar. The calendar now shows ISO week numbers, and you can jump to a week by typing it into search. On the phone, the month view got a grid that is actually made for a phone.
Every app now says hello. The first time you open an app, a small intro greets you: a calm sky scene with the app's illustration on the horizon, what the app is for, and the three things to try first. Apps with more to show get a second page. You see it once, then it stays out of your way; the "?" up top brings it back whenever you want. In dark mode the sky becomes a starry night.
Discover keeps going. Every tab in Discover, from live streams to posts, pictures and communities, now loads more as you scroll instead of stopping at the first two dozen results.
UI/UX#
Search that actually finds things. Type once and see live shows, radio stations, videos, people and collections together, or tap a scope to focus on just one. Every result opens exactly where you'd expect - a live show opens the room, a station opens its own screen, a video opens the watch page.
Topics you can actually browse. Twelve everyday categories - Bitcoin, Crypto, Music, Talk shows, Gaming, News, Sports, Tech, AI, Learning, Art, and Fun & memes - each showing what's live, playing or posted right now. A quiet list of every other tag sits underneath for anyone who wants to dig further; nothing is ever hidden, just organized.
Cinema mode, rebuilt for the phone. A letterboxed picture with light-touch controls, chat sitting comfortably below with nothing overlapping, and every on-picture button sized properly for a thumb. Scrolling up through a live room's chat now collapses the player into a tidy sticky header instead of shoving it off screen.
The Cinema home widget. A quick glance from your home screen shows how many shows are live right now and a peek at the top one, with one tap through to the full app.
Every content warning is respected everywhere in Cinema - search results, topic pages, your Library, and your history all blur sensitive content the same way the rest of Lotus does, and muted people never show up in any of it.
One familiar feel across the whole suite. Contacts, Groups, Scheduling, Tasks and Chat now share the same toolbar, the same search field and the same mobile patterns: a compact rail on phones, actions collected into a bottom sheet, and jump-to-latest in shared media. Things you learned in one app now apply in all of them.
The Bookmarks button lives inside the search bar. It sits at the right end of the search capsule as a quiet pill, exactly where your eyes already are. Click it for a small "Recent bookmarks" preview with an Open all link, or tap it on a phone to go straight to the app.
Encrypted lists no longer knock on your signer's door all at once. List names and counts appear immediately when the app opens; a list's private contents unlock the moment you open that list. People using a signing app will notice the difference on the first cold start.
The invoice editor follows you. While you edit, the live preview scrolls to the part of the document you are working on, so you always see the effect of what you are typing.
Honest states everywhere in Bookmarks. A server that cannot be reached is never dressed up as an empty library, a page that could not be captured says so plainly, and every empty screen offers a sensible next step.
The app info pages went on a diet. Six stacked sections became one friendly screen: a headline, three things to try, one button. Every line was rewritten in everyday words, and NadaNada finally got its own intro instead of borrowing the Home text.
Code Quality#
Cinema's whole catalogue - live shows, videos, radio, collections - reads through one small, well-tested set of protocol modules, so every screen shows and hides content the same way.
Watch history lives entirely on your own device, written by a lightweight recorder that watches playback from the outside rather than living inside the shared player code Chat and Groups also depend on.
Extracted a shared UI foundation (toolbar, search field, dialog and app-shell behavior) so each app stops re-implementing the same pieces slightly differently.
All bookmark protocol handling lives in small, pure modules with focused tests.
The bookmark import formats share one sanitizer and budget layer, so every parser enforces the same size, depth and safety rules.
The whole frontend test suite grew to over 1570 tests in this release, covering Cinema's catalogue and rooms, Bookmarks, invoicing and everything else in Lotus.
Technical Updates#
Cinema reads the open Nostr standards for live streams, on-demand video and radio end to end, including chapters, captions, cast credits and zap splits, and renders every one of them tolerantly so a slightly different publisher never breaks the page.
Comments and reactions on videos use the same general-purpose Nostr mechanics as the rest of Lotus, kept plain and unbranded so any other app reading the same network sees the same conversation.
Polls anchor to a live room the honest way: a poll published on its own, quoted into the chat, so any other Nostr app can still show it as a normal quoted post even without Cinema's own poll cards.
Watch history and playback position are stored locally only and are never published anywhere.
Bookmarks implement the Nostr standards end to end: NIP-51 lists with lossless round-trips of unknown data, NIP-B0 web bookmarks, NIP-09 deletion with time-scoped tombstones, and NIP-65 relay routing, including fetching another author's shared list from that author's own relays.
The private browser-bookmark library syncs across devices through encrypted app-data shards on your own relays; per-record clocks merge concurrent edits without resurrecting deletions.
New backend reader service powers Pro offline copies: authenticated with NIP-98, gated on an active Pro plan, hardened against request forgery, and deliberately stateless, so the server never keeps what you read.
The invoice PDF engine runs entirely in the browser with embedded fonts and explicit pagination; no document ever touches a server.
Contributors#
Thanks to everyone who shipped this release:
@pratik227 (Pratik Patel)
Community#
Try Lotus: https://lotus.mybuho.de
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